Random House

Patrick Lindsay’s Back from the Dead, one of the first books published on the Bali bombing, is primarily an evocation of the inferno and its aftermath, through the eyes of those who survived it. There is ‘Peter’s story’ (the author’s central focus), ‘Nashie’s story’, ‘Col’s story’ and so on, all interpolated with extensive quotes, mostly from the victims of the blast. Despite the painfully vernacular tone of the early chapters, this book is a good primer on the terrorist attack and its consequences.

This is an entertaining family biography of Oxford philosophy from 1900 to 1960. Nikhil Krishnan has mined various autobiographies and reminiscences to craft a series of biographical sketches, anecdotes, and snapshots of philosophy at Oxford during the twentieth century. He has traced the connections, legacies, and disagreements among the philosophers, demonstrating how, over the years, pupils came to inherit the chairs of the professors who had trained them, passing on certain attitudes and practices, characteristic of the Oxford way of doing things. 

Two new young adult novels explore the complexities of family. While Maureen McCarthy’s Somebody’s Crying details a daughter’s painful loss of her mother, Alyssa Brugman’s Girl Next Door negotiates the hardships of teenage life while coming to terms with family bankruptcy.

As I sat down to write this review, two news stories jostled for prominence on the ABC’s website. One was the unfolding story of two brothers who were trapped on Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain. Only one brother would come back (the other fell 500 metres to his death). Lincoln Hall would understand what the brothers went through. Hall is an Australian mountaineer who was, famously or infamously, left for dead at 8700 metres on Mt Everest. Having made the summit, Hall was heading back down with sherpas when he was struck down by an oedema, a brain malfunction caused by oxygen deprivation. His body gave out. Without a pulse or any sign of life, Hall was abandoned on a rocky ledge. (Ten days earlier, an English climber had been left to die on the mountain as others trekked past him. Hall was luckier, but both these events sparked condemnation, including from Sir Edmund Hillary.)

Rod Reeve manages a company that directs foreign-aid projects. Rather than flying in with helicopter-loads of rice, he focuses on ‘capacity-building’ and infrastructure. Agricultural science is his own speciality, but he has set up and run a variety of projects. He has worked to counter opium production in Pakistan, develop dryland farming in Africa, Iraq and Jordan (he had to evacuate during the 1991 Gulf War), and improve health and education in China, Laos and Indonesia. He assisted with the quarantine service in Papua New Huinea and post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh.

The timing of Peter Manning’s book, in which he seeks more Australian empathy with Muslims, was exquisite. The mufti of Australia in September urged the opposite, telling his flock that Jews and Christians were ‘the most evil of God’s creation on the face of the earth’. He also had colourful things to say about women being responsible if men turn to crime, or commit rape or adultery. Of course, the media overlooked Taj Din al-Hilaly’s interesting view that the axis of evil is Jewish and Christian. They also ignored his peculiar take on criminology. As usual, sex was what sold, giving the government a useful diversion from its floundering on climate change and the quagmire in Iraq.

The year is 1806. While pacing the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the tall and windswept Laura Morrison exchanges keen glances with the intense Mr Templeton, but he fails to meet later appointments, leaving Laura in the lurch.

Berggasse 19, the address at which Sigmund Freud and his family lived for almost fifty years, is now Vienna’s Freud Museum. It is the other Freud Museum, the one in London, that houses the extensive collection of antiquities which is Janine Burke’s main focus in The Gods of Freud, but the Berggasse museum contains a number of Freud’s other personal possessions, including some little bottles, pots and brushes that are the remnants of an old-fashioned gentleman’s dressing-case. Of high quality, these well-used tools of personal attention to a body now long dead are scratched and dented from use.

Towards the end of her story, Jean Debelle Lamensdorf admits that she ‘wanted to mentally shut out the horror of Vietnam – to remember only a sanitised version of our year out there’. Having spent twelve gruelling months working as a volunteer for the Red Cross, tending to the non-medical welfare of wounded ANZAC troops, Debelle Lamensdorf has succeeded in cleansing this personal account of life during one of modern history’s most bloody wars.

A personal renaissance, with a raison d’ệtre of such significance that it shifts the reverie of the characters in this book into a dimension of former youthfulness and revitalises the possibilities that seem to vanish with age: On a Wing and a Prayer is about friendship, loyalty and respect in the lives of three ordinary people drawn together under extraordinary circumstances in a small country town in central New South Wales. It confounds the adage that once you have reached a certain stage in life there is no further use for you.